Pickledtezcat Game Devblog

Treasures of the deep dwellers is not a triple A game. It's going to be pretty old fashioned, with a small viewport and a map on the same screen. Much of the rest of the screen is going to play host to the UI which will have a lot of the stuff you need all on one screen. I love the great graphics of modern games like Legend of Grimrock, but the blender game engine isn't really up to the task of making games of that caliber. I also don't have that much time to devote to asset creations, meaning my game simply wouldn't look as good even if I was as talented as the guys from the major studios. Anyway, after working on the viewports I found happily that it greatly increases the performance of the game. Rasterizer usage is way down, and the viewports mechanism also allows people with slower computers to reduce the resolution of the viewport without changing the main window. If you wanted you could ramp it way up too and enjoy my dated graphics. After a few tries I ...

This week I've been fleshing out the dictionaries for my dynamic item generation system. I made a few changes since it was first designed, like simplifying the materials and making them less exotic. Now there are a lot of normal materials (like COPPER and GLASS) and some exotic or magical materials. Items are generated with a number of attributes. Which ones they get depends on the type of object, its quality and its material. Here are a few examples: I think it's going quite well so far, though I'm having to generate a lot of items and check their attributes so I can fine tune the dictionary rules. You can see the "CLUB$1" up there, which is a rare, ivory, toy club. I think children's club would be a better attribute than toy. That sounds strange in some cases. There's a ugly, copper long-sword, which is both blunted and corroded. Items can have several damage attributes, depending on their quality. As they get used in game and pick up...

For anyone who's interested in the newest version of the game you can see the current video diary here : I'm very happy with the atmosphere of the game so far. I feel like it's something I can work with. I've got a lot of ideas for the game, but for now I'm just going to keep slogging away trying to get a working gameplay demo. The schedule so far is: 1. Item generation. 2. Basic player stats. 3. Inventory management. 4. Moving items between the screen and the inventory. 5. Using items to attack and trigger events. I'm going to be working a lot with messages this time around. That should clear up many of the hurdles I was facing in past versions of t he game. One problem I had before is that I had to complete both player mechanics, and enemy mechanics simultaneously. A player attacked a monster causing damage directly, the monster had to process that damage and so on. With messages, I can just send a message and forget about it. It doesn...

I ran in to some serious problems with Vinland 1936, so I'm shelving it for now and revisiting an earlier project. Kind of. Treasure of the deep dwellers was a 3d team based roguelike. Some ways it diverged from standard roguelikes is that it had multiple player characters (a team of 4), real time game play (not turn based) and it had 3d graphics. Unfortunately it was a bit more than I could handle. The new approach is an attempt to simplify the project so that it can function more like a traditional roguelike. A big problem I had before was keeping track of the 4 agents. They tended to run off or get lost. I had to calculate line of sight and map reveal from all 4 agents. Now I've switched to an "Eye of the Beholder" type setup, where the whole team is contained in a single tile. Likewise monsters are represented in mobs of up to 4 agents in a single tile. Other benefits of this type of gameplay is that you never need to see the player's characters (...